Uwe Tellkamp: Sleeping in the Hours. a novel

Review note on Die Zeit, June 15, 2022

Reviewer Thomas Aschwer takes another look at Uwe Telkamp’s Sleeping in the Hours in order to extract it by all means of a critique of ideology. Because beyond Tellkamp’s poems, Assheuer discovers more than just media satire in which journalism and culture enter into an unholy left-wing alliance with power. Instead, the reviewer sees a retrograde historical revision in action, in which the Stasi in the Federal Republic not only rose “like a broth cube in soup,” but above all National Socialism emerged as a reaction to the “eternal left,” which Assheuer also believes that Tellkamp lets Communist dignitaries hunt bugs in Birkenheide in a Soviet GAZ-69 off-road vehicle.

Review note on Neue Zürcher Zeitung, May 17, 2022

Reviewer Paul Gundel realizes that Uwe Tellkamp’s new book Sleeping in the Hours is a profound insult to the author. On a labyrinth of 900 pages, one can notice a writer who is supposed to embody Tillkamp vividly in the years between the fall of the Wall and the wave of refugees in 2015, lamenting the end of free speech in Germany, Gandel explains. In essence, according to the reviewer, this is the facts of German reunification, which unfortunately do not follow the questions of historical interpretation that he raised in a particularly elegant way. The footsteps of the military geese alternate with flowery descriptions, Jandl’s sighs, who also does not like the role of the victim in which the protagonist sneaks, although at the same time he is always right, notes the annoying reviewer.

Note revision to Frankfurter Rundschau, 16 May 2022

Reviewer Judith von Sternberg discovers some powerfully told scenes, sometimes witty phrasing and brilliant prose passages in Ove Telkamp’s monumental novel Sleeping in the Hours, heralded and ten years awaited. Of course, it follows Tellkamp’s successful novel “The Tower” and continues the story from the point of view of the previous supporting characters. But one shouldn’t expect a consistent story, as Sternberg warns, Tellkamp is hopelessly mired in this “new havoc of the shell” in ever new approaches with new characters at all, that neither the People Index nor its “Catalog of Contents” help . The reviewer cannot take seriously the fact that he exposes a grand conspiracy by the “main media” jointly with the government and intelligence and laments immigration and the dictatorship of opinion. “Nice” humor and “flat” irony are still uncomfortable for her.

Review note on Deutschlandfunk on May 16, 2022

Reviewer Jan Drees sees something more in Uwe Tellkamp’s new novel than “an epic conspiracy theory zigzagging the alternate-right narrative” and deconstructs some of the many paths Tellkamp lays down. The plot framework is the story of Fabian Hoffmann, who in 2015 works in the depths of a fictional coal island of a more powerful branch of the previous “Stassi” and is constantly writing a history of the country, an excerpt from which is the current volume, summarizing the references, who finds it difficult to distinguish a clear plot between the threads of the narrative ” Confused and confused.” Drees discovers the only arc of suspense in the hero’s search for traitors to the rest of his family, who were arrested shortly before he fled the Republic. The reviewer notes that the author organizes this research with “long, twisted, sometimes exaggerated sentences and structures” that want to give a literary voice to the perception of political forces on the right-wing spectrum. Even if some of the scenes themselves could certainly impress the reviewer, Drees prefers to speculate on how quickly this heavy part of the book will sink into the water.

Review note on Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, May 14, 2022

Reviewer Andreas Platthaus recalls years of bewilderment about Uwe Tellkamp’s new novel, now available, and the author’s questionable political convictions, before throwing himself into the “independent” text. The book is neither round nor single, Blathaus warns, because Tellkamp doesn’t strive for it at all, as the reviewer believes. According to the reviewer, the layering thinking that began in 1989 and the continuous expansion of the material in all directions is quite successful, as is the contrasting character drawing. For Platthaus at least a change from the “unifying mix” of contemporary German literature.

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Review note on the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday, 14 May 2022

Reviewer Julia Encke can’t find anything at all in Uwe Tellkamp’s new novel. In this case, the long wait leads to the birth of monsters: a 900-page ham, which the reviewer already after a few pages has made “false education scraps”, all sorts of arrogant technical talk, “the production of meaning and new formations”. “Main stream media,” an adjective for posts without end and ending loose narration. Reluctance spreads in Encke. The call for liberation. Encke also found it doubtful that the script was supposed to be a sequel to “Der Turm” because only the characters actually reappear, she noted.

Review note on Die Tageszeitung, May 14, 2022

Reviewer Dirk Knipphals looks tired after reading Uwe Tellkamp’s 900-page sequel to “Der Turm,” which is often “boring work” for him. Where he initially finds an octopus-like movement (animals appear repeatedly) in the novel, which carefully pierces the abyss of society with its claws, quickly becomes too fast for him, as Tillkamp has been traversing community-political issues since reunification. Nor does he like the fact that the 2015 story about first-person narrator Fabian Hoffmann, the son of a dissident persecuted by the Stasi and now working for the Secret Security Agency himself, increasingly takes on conspiracy theories and sometimes evokes memories of the author’s xenophobic statements. At least Nipples is pleased with some of the “horribly hateful” clips. In the end, however, the novel failed for him because he doesn’t really know what to do with either his “experience of transformation” or with the current political landscape, which is heavily influenced by the media – so not enough to make an analysis, says the critic.

Review note on Süddeutsche Zeitung, 12 May 2022

Reviewer Marie Schmidt is happy to publish Uwe Tellkamp’s new novel. She believes that the book cannot be made legendary later in the sense of the abolition discussions. Apart from that, she does not think much about the lyrics. Reading as a satirical continuation of Der Turm leaves the book just as bewildering as when it is understood as a fictional story about the “deep state”, full of retro elements. In terms of structure, the script, with its many temporal levels, abrupt episode endings, “scheme” characters, and the constant swing between fiction and reality seem inaccessible. For Schmidt, it is a confused and interests book that offers the reader no incentive to read it to the end.

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Books.de

Review note on Die Zeit, May 12, 2022

Reviewer Adam Sobuchinsky considers Owe Telkamp to be “the master of the past.” Whenever the author enters into discussions between opponents and intellectuals at the time of monotheism in his new book, the reviewer is fascinated and smells the talent of style. Unfortunately, according to Soboczynski, this is the exception. But once Tellkamp deals with the present, it becomes difficult for the reference and inconvenient in terms of conspiracy theory. After only 50 pages, he found reading so exhausting that he began to doubt his mental abilities. But no, that’s because of the lack of personal psychology, the lack of guidance, the leaps in time, and the general lack of coherence in this book, says Sobuchinsky. The reviewer complains that even knowing the previous novel and the blurb is of little help.

Review Note on Die Welt, May 7, 2022

Reviewer Richard Kämmerlings momentarily ignores the author’s cries of “illegal mass immigration” into the German social order and praises Uwe Tellkamp’s new novel as a “wonderful” and highly poetic story of a fictional case as the successor organization to the Stasi. How Telkamp described to the narrator the events of 1989/90 and 2015 in a highly ironic way makes Camerlings with mixed feelings. According to the reviewer, the text repeatedly leans toward “openly xenophobic and Islamophobic” and the paranoid tipping point or “a novel a treatise on the nature of power” acquires an uncomfortable affinity with the “pseudo-journalism stereotype,” says Kamerlings.